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The Twenty Minute VCOana Olteanu: Why Founders Should Expect More From Their VCs | 20VC #950
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Raising the Bar: How Founders Should Demand More From VCs
- Oana Olteanu, partner at SignalFire, shares her journey from a Romanian village to Silicon Valley VC and explains why founders should dramatically raise their expectations of investors. She introduces the idea of the “Schrödinger’s VC” — firms that loudly promise help but add no real value once on the cap table — and outlines how to identify and manage them. A large part of the conversation focuses on what great VC support actually looks like: concrete homework, proactive customer work, board effectiveness, and founder communities. Oana also discusses diversity in hiring, structural misalignments between founders and VCs, and how she’s trying to model a more founder-serving, low-ego approach to venture.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasFounders must actively screen VCs for real behavior, not promises.
During fundraising, watch what investors *do* in diligence—how they help, reference patterns, and how they talk about tough times in prior companies—rather than relying on marketing or brand alone.
Treat your VC like a resource you manage and assign homework to.
To avoid “useless” capital, founders should send materials with clear asks, give investors concrete projects (e.g., customer research, candidate sourcing, specific intros), and hold them accountable for outcomes.
Board meetings are only valuable if well-prepared and tightly run.
Great boards start with pre-calls, a focused written update (not a crutch slide deck), clear highlight/lowlight sections, and in-meeting time devoted to the meaty strategic issues—not rehashing what everyone already read.
You can and should engineer diversity; it’s not “too hard.”
If your candidate pool isn’t diverse, the problem is upstream: change recruiters if needed, reach out respectfully without reducing people to their gender, leverage dedicated communities (like Oana’s “She’s Ready to Dev”), and implement inclusive policies and benefits.
Founder–VC alignment improves when investors genuinely prioritize service over ego.
Misalignments (like VCs selling early for DPI) are real, but can be mitigated by transparent conversations, long-term thinking, and a default stance of optimizing for the company’s and founder’s success.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI'm running from unfulfilled potential. I think there is nothing sadder than unfulfilled potential.
— Oana Olteanu
Schrödinger's VC is what I call a VC who preaches a lot of help, especially before winning a deal. But then if you ask the founders, they will tell you they added no value.
— Oana Olteanu
While a VC cannot play the chess game for you and move the pieces, they have seen a lot more games and therefore they can advise from near the chessboard.
— Oana Olteanu
You cannot hire diverse people if they are not even in your candidate pool.
— Oana Olteanu
I don't like to work with jerks. You can be amazingly smart, but you also have to actually want to build a healthy culture in your company.
— Oana Olteanu
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
